Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke will head to New York next month for a live interview with Oprah Winfrey as he continues to mull a 2020 presidential run.

O’Rourke will be part of “Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations from Times Square” on Feb. 5. He’ll speak to Winfrey one-on-one as part of an event featuring others, including actors Bradley Cooper and Michael B. Jordan.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed a sentencing memorandum Tuesday with the federal court in Washington, D.C. that recommends General Michael Flynn receive no jail time after pleading guilty to the crime of lying to the FBI, citing “substantial” assistance to the government in its investigations.

The mainstream media interpreted that remark as evidence that Flynn gave Mueller key information against President Donald Trump and Russian “collusion.”

More likely, however, Mueller’s request reflects the fact that Flynn did not actually commit the crime to which he pleaded guilty. No less than then-FBI director James Comey told Congress last March that Flynn had not, in fact, lied to the FBI.

If Flynn had demanded a trial on the merits, he could have subpoenaed Comey in his defense. The Special Counsel likely pressured Flynn to cooperate using other accusations — against him, or perhaps his family.

It is not clear exactly what information Flynn provided Mueller. The only other crime referenced in the sentencing document is Flynn’s failure to register as a foreign agent for Turkey.

Again, though, that is rather flimsy. It is rare that anyone in Washington is prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and rarer still that anyone is pursued under the Logan Act, which was the reason Flynn was under surveillance in the first place.

In fact, the most explosive piece of information in the sentencing document is not about collusion with Russians, but about the collusion between the media, the intelligence services, and the outgoing members of the Obama administration.

The document begins its recitation of Flynn’s offenses by citing information that had appeared in the Washington Post from a leaked, classified surveillance transcript in which Flynn’s name had been “unmasked”:

Days prior to the FBI’s interview of the defendant, the Washington Post had published a story alleging that he had spoken with Russia’s ambassador to the United States on December 29, 2016, the day the United States announced sanctions and other measures against Russia in response to that government’s actions intended to interfere with the 2016 election (collectively, “sanctions”). See David Ignatius, Why did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s hacking?, WASH. POST (Jan. 12, 2017).

That information, the document suggests, led the FBI to interview Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017 — the conversation in which he did not (according to Comey) lie to them, but which landed him in trouble.

The government had the surveillance transcripts, and it knew what Flynn had told the Russian ambassador. But the Post‘s intervention was crucial in setting the trap in which to ensnare Flynn and turn him into a government witness.

Mueller’s sentencing document does not mention the fact that the information published in the Post was illegally leaked to the press by the intelligence services. And the reason that happened was that the outgoing Obama administration changed the rules on the sharing of classified surveillance among government agencies, weakening privacy protections, probably intending that such information be more difficult to keep secret, and easier to leak.

Moreover, someone in the Obama administration — we do not yet know who, though it had to be someone senior — “unmasked” Flynn’s name to make sure he was exposed.

So while we do not yet know Mueller’s next moves, what the Flynn sentencing document reinforces is the that the Russia collusion investigation was tainted from the start by a crime committed against Flynn himself — with the collusion of the media, the deep state, and Obama’s loyalists.

Tuesday on MSNBC’s “All In,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) said President Donald Trump was a “poster boy for what a mob protester looks like.”

Discussing conservative media calling protests a “mob,” Waters said, “Well, I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s not believable. As a matter of fact, this country was built on peaceful protests. And those of us who were part of the Civil Rights movement, who understood the power of protest taught by Dr. Martin Luther King and others know that we cannot allow Donald Trump and anybody else to take protests away from us and to deem it to be violent and to try and make us look like a mob. It is because of peaceful protests, not only in the Civil Rights movement, but the labor movement was able to get better wages, able to get better working conditions, able to get better pay, everything because they learned to march and protest. And they still do it today. We know that protest is guaranteed to a democratic society. We know that this is guaranteed to us by the Constitution.”

What A Damn Joke

She continued, “They’re trying to change the description of protest and call it a mob. Well, this president is the poster boy for what a mob protester looks like. He is—matter of fact, he’s the one who has been violent in his speech. He’s the one in his rallies has said things like ‘I’d like to punch him in the face.’ Trump said that at one of his rallies, he said ‘knock the crap out of them, would you, and seriously, okay, just knock the hell out of them, I mean, I promise I will pay the legal fees.’ That’s the kind of talk that he has done. That’s violent talk. With don’t have that kind of talk that has come from the women who are protesting. As a matter of fact, this country is past due for the kind of protests that we have seen women do in the last few days as we have gone through this confirmation process of Kavanaugh. It is time for women to say that we’re tired of being disrespected.”

“Then this orange apparition had the nerve to say she worked for him. You lugubrious leach, you dopey doppelgänger of deceit and deviance, you lethal liar, you dimwitted dictator, you foolish fascist,” Dyson continued. “She [didn’t] work for you, she worked above you. She worked beyond you. Get your preposition right. Then he [has] the nerve to say he’s going to grab it. That’s not what Aretha Franklin said. I’m going to give you something that you can feel.”

The Fox News host told her panel that, despite the “amazing” performances of stars like Jennifer Hudson and Gladys Knight, she was “distracted by Louis Farrakhan who was in every single shot.”

“What was he doing there?” she asked the panel.

Liberal economist Kylie Patterson acknowledged the “mixed” history of Farrakhan but also noted both Franklin’s and Farrakhan’s involvement in the “liberation movement.”

“This is her funeral,” Patterson said. “I mean, it’s her choice, who she wants there, how she wants people sitting.”

“I just wonder how much jockeying there was for prime position,” MacCallum asked. “I saw that he was kind of pushing his website and all of this on Twitter. And I thought, ‘Gee, that’s kind of a little bit unfortunate’ that it was distracting in that way. He, you know, has said awful things about Jewish people, about white people, about gay people and I thought it was never the message that I heard in Aretha Franklin’s music.”